>I was under the impression that high-demand employees moved pretty freely among the big Silicon Valley companies.

Actually, employees in California have some of the strongest protection against labor mobility limits, such as non-compete clauses. Massachusetts and Texas are moving in that direction. That's one of the reasons the companies involved are facing massive damage claims.

Yes, @asksqn, I've always thought it's much better for a litigant to avoid getting forced into a class action lawsuit. Sure, the primary attorney loves the idea; s/he gets the 40%, 50% or whatever of the total settlement. But all plaintiffs share in the (vastly diminishing) pot of money on the other side of that share, a share that attorneys are anxious to bolster in order to make their class action suit more imposing (and profitable).

I believe your unit of measure is wrong--requested damages were $3 BILLION (with a B) dollars, potentially trebled to $9 BILLION if it can be proven these companies willfully violated antitrust laws. ...And I'm not sure how they could argue it was an "accident" and that "management didn't know" since many of the emails released so far have been from the upper-echelons of the involved companies, a few embarassing ones from Steve Jobs and Larry Page, for example.

Funny thing about class action lawsuits is that the only winners are the legal counsel. Those consumers/employees on whose behalf the suit was filed, not so much. Adding further insult to injury, the piddly $9M settlement isn't even a slap on the wrist compared to the combined profit margins of the defendants. And lastly, this case will no doubt settle and therefore, not even serve as a legal precedent for future action. So in the final analysis, where consumers/employees are concerned, this case is nothing more than an exercise in futility and job security for litigators.

Probably the most egregious example is the legal profession - the non-compete that most legal associates sign when joining a firm isn't even the half of it - if you leave a firm for reasons other than spousal relocation or health or going back to school or somesuch, you might as well move to another city (or country if your firm has enough reach), because you're effectively black-listed.

The allegations remind of the collusion in Major League Baseball in the mid-'80s, whereby owners agreed privately to rein in their spending on free agents, sign them to shorter contraxts -- or not sign them at all. The owners didn't get away with it (they ended up settling). But some big name players still lost out on some serious money.

I was under the impression that high-demand employees moved pretty freely among the big Silicon Valley companies. If there were non-poaching agreements in place, that seems pretty sleazy, and puts some dents in the self-perpetuated notion that these organizations are pure-minded meritocracies.

We may not learn the full details of this no-poaching arrangement if the cases settles, as is now expected, which is too bad. Recruiter 'arrangements,' on and off the books, to prevent poaching are ususally bad news for employees and I think they happen far more often than we realize, not just in tech or IT.

Note to Eric Schmidt: when trying to avoid a paper trail, best not to write an email stating "I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later" before taking the conversation offline.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.